Bruno K Öijer is an unusual poet. His reading tours draw audiences like a rock concert, no one who has seen and heard his black-clad apparition in darkened rooms forgets that experience.
At the same time, his poems are extremely readable, they are just as strong on the book page as they are on stage. The intensity is there, more subdued now that Öijer is over seventy, but he still has a keen eye for the seemingly irrelevant details and neglected nooks and crannies of existence – and his direct address also opens the reader’s eyes.
The new poetry collectionthe first in ten years, opens with a two-line: “I write/ so we exist”. A program statement that says the poet is a solitary creator, but the poem makes us all alive. A romantic attitude that Öijer always had and combined with an everyday matter-of-factness to high-pitched and immediately accessible poetry. He dreams back to the streets of his childhood
and lingered at a shop window
with a sparkling water curtain
which cooled presented goods
I tried to look inside
but the streaks of water got everything in there
to flicker in blurred waves as in a mirage
Childhood is the one pole in the poetry collection, death the other, and in between that darkness Öijer once exchanged rings with and remained faithful. The images have become simpler but no less impactful, the presence is still total, but the sense of life is more melancholy.
Öijer is a highly sighted poet, in the stump of a fallen fir he traces a gramophone record where the wind sets down its pickup needle, and when vinyl has now had a renaissance, both old and young understand that image.
Even nature is seeing in Öijer’s world, observes man and ages with him, the sky is no longer a child playing ball with the clouds. Romantic painters and poets would recognize themselves in such an image, Love Almqvist is also one of the ancestors Öijer mentions.
There are also hidden predecessors here, Emily Dickson who approached death without lowering her gaze, and in the last poem “Love and a foggy window” Bob Dylan’s “Love minus zero”, no limit is heard, it flickers before the eyes like in the shop window of childhood , painfully beautiful it is.